Guises

by Charlee Jacob

Martin climbed out last and we stood briefly on the roof with our son between us. Neither one of us was strong enough now to carry him alone so we lifted him together as we flew into the sky. The soldiers ran to the window and cursed, but could do nothing.

  Our son was not a flier. Only those who had changed flew. Those born into the dark could not. Matt had never been mortal. He’d been conceived after both Martin and I had given ourselves to the night. Odd, you might think it would be the other way around, that those born with twilight native to their genes would have the inherent ability for wingshifting. This was a misconception on the part of the populace who opted for remaining human, that the fact that our children couldn’t fly was somehow a degenerative characteristic. Ah, but they could race as super wolves and spread themselves into spectral smoke. Bats weren’t noble creatures but wolves were fine, the consummate beasts. To be able to become smoke was profoundly mystic. Matt was such a little master before starvation made him too weak to shift. We’d been so proud of our son.

  ««—»»

  Once, I wanted to be a writer, but I never had much success. Maybe if we’d had more time. As we flew with Matt between us—hunted animals now—I composed out loud into the air. Unless we were too weak to fly. On those nights we ran, on all fours through the dark, down the eastern coast from a burned-out Boston to the monuments of D.C. that melted like fragile images in a wax museum.

  There were many refugees, some like us fleeing at night and seeking the next shelter before daybreak. Others were mortals whom we easily trapped, taking only what we needed and then letting them go, reluctant to harm them because we used to be like them. We went over mountains, simpler to find cover from the sun but harder to find people. We grew feeble until even running was sluggish, humanly slow.

  Finally we were sick, locating just before one midnight a farm in the heartland that hadn’t been abandoned. It was alone in a quadrant of cornfields. We dragged ourselves through scorched and useless crops, thinking we saw moonlight along the path to the house. Heart. Land. How inviting. The words when spoken were meaty. We could almost swallow them and feel satiated.

  “I love thee as I love the night,” I whispered into Martin’s ear as we crouched in stuffy shadows from farm buildings. Matt was gasping. “One in the same, darkness and you. Come seal me in your evening arms and make us a bed upon the wings of nightbirds.”

  My husband nuzzled my shoulder affectionately, excitement barely suppressed because we could sense the living warmth glowing within the walls. We were nearly fainting from hunger, smelling the rusty odor of the blood of those inside.

  “The infinite lingers in your breath.” I sighed as we crept to windows, prepared to launch ourselves through them. “And there is the taste of twilight on your tongue. The world is a dreaming tomb tonight, where death is not an end but the genesis of a long, graceful running under the tangible myrrh of the resonant stars.”

  We weren’t strong enough to beat down the door. So sick. The metallic red odor was narcotic.

  The windows shattered inward as we threw our bodies through them. The glass cut the family sitting by a radio in their living room. But it didn’t cut them so much that they couldn’t jump to their collective feet and scream. I breathed in their wonderful scent, murmuring as I squeezed Martin’s hand before grabbing a pulsing throat, “I do love thee as I love the night, inhaling the musk that never fades.”

  We didn’t want to kill them. We didn’t really intend that it go that far. We couldn’t help ourselves once we started. We were so hungry. It can make even the most honorable into hunters.

  From that first time it became easier to drain what solitaries we tracked down. They were so few and far between that every drop that flowed through them might be what stood between paralysis and the ability to run to one more shadow and one more straggler. When I first crossed, I did it for poetry, never dreaming I would eventually kill or that the compulsion for the elixir could escalate into a fever in which I became a butcher.

  We saw scarlet glowing on purple horizons. Corona bolts dancing that far away seemed elemental and elegant. We watched the distant storms in awe, as the solar wind blew back to us the stench of ruined meat.

  We ran along the coast of Louisiana, splashing through fetid bayou, scores of water moccasins rising up, deadly mouths sprung open and as cottony white as ours. We came up under a boat of Cajun fishermen, biting them to discover that their flesh tasted of crawfish. But their blood had been rich so we managed to fly for a while, lifting Matt who giggled when taken high enough to see the lights below twinkle in sequins. When we descended at last to find a safe place to sleep, I had trouble losing the wings. I shifted back painfully, bowed into an arc, shoulder blades jutting monstrously. It frightened me, but it was finally gone two sunsets later as we ran across northeast Texas and into Dallas.

  Going down the sidewalk under the illuminated dandelion of Reunion Tower, we were shaken by the swift work of the Aurora Commission. We hadn’t seen that much of them since we’d been driven from our home in Massachusetts. They were easier to dodge in the outlying areas. Sticking to routes that included no roads, it was possible to be missed by them entirely. Of course, it was also easier to starve since refugees kept to the roads.

  We didn’t attempt to feast the first night. We had been scared off from hunting after the woman was killed in the underground parking. So it had been three nights since we’d had anything at all. Matt was stumbling. People were staring at our haggardness suspiciously. They used to say you couldn’t be too rich or too thin. But when the gauntness began to resemble the feral, mortals might recognize the animal you carried. We had to leave the compact crowds of downtown for the privacy of the park at White Rock Lake. We hoped to find some succulent bag lady asleep amid the heat-wilted willows.

  There were swans on the silent water, gliding rhetorical question marks in ghostly white feathers. Matt scampered ahead of us and into the water, splashing up to his chin the way a frisky dog would. He caught a swan not too far from the bank and dragged it to shore with its wings furiously beating. Then he broke its delicate neck to drink deeply. It wasn’t nearly enough to fill a starving hollow but it took a fraction off the edge of the boy’s hunger.

  Martin and I sniffed the air. There was the scent of rust somewhere to the left, slight, pulsing only one set of coronary rhythms. It was gliding gradually closer. It glowed like a ripe strawberry in the dark. Matt smelled it, too, and trembled with excitement, the swan’s blood still damp on his tongue. He whimpered and ran in the direction of that glowing strawberry.

  “Matt,” Martin said sharply, trying to warn him to show caution. “Wait, boy. We’ll check it out first.”

  But Matt had already leapt onto the man slowly pedaling up the old bike path. He knocked him off the ten speed and the two of them rolled into the dried grass. The man didn’t yell much, hearing the growl from the half-pint who had tackled him. He groped for a device clipped to his belt and managed to set it off. Latest gadget on the market, similar in intent to the rape whistle. It was a vampire alarm, tattling a noise that was a high-pitched, oscillating birdcall. Matt didn’t care. He easily soaked in—grunting with each—the few punches the mortal managed to connect and then leaned in for the soft throbbing artery which beckoned so deliciously.

  We arrived to see the shock in the man’s eyes of being murdered by a wispy seven-year-old with the tender face of a poster child. He blinked his confusion, limply flailing one more fist as Matt tore into him.

  “I don’t know if anybody heard that or not,” Martin said, worried as I ran forward.

  I was helpless to resist the richness of that odor. Our faces were close, Matt’s and mine, brushing brows as I bent to lap up greedily. He winked at me. I got no more than a few swallows when I heard Martin shriek in dying bells.

  We bolted upright in the grass, startled, confused in starving bloodlust. And saw a soldier deliver another blow to the spike gleaming through my husband’s chest.

  Aurora had
arrived speedily, silently. We had just been too preoccupied and enthralled, filling ourselves on what emptied from the dying man into us, to hear the commission’s park patrol pull up. I stood and charged, screaming at them hysterically as the soldier swung the axe and my Martin’s handsome head parted a gaping rictus deeper in the neck than what Matt had done to the man on the bike. That damnable tape switched on then and their anthem warbled out a slaughtering vaudeville. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray… Another swing and the head rolled free. Martin’s chiming song echoed off, backdropped by You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  I howled, feeling my heart doing a nearly mortal twist. I wanted to rush at them, kill them. Which I wasn’t strong enough to do but the fury and grief could easily have made me try it anyway. There was Matt to consider. I tried to turn in time to grab my boy and flee, praying I had enough blood in me to wingshift and that I’d be strong enough to carry him up. I knew I didn’t. It was pointless anyway because the soldiers had come around the side of us and now scooped him up where he still hunched over his kill. He opened his mouth in terror and cried, “Mommie!”, the mortal’s gore spilling out onto his tee-shirt, a sparkling gobbet of it clinging to his chin.

  I attacked in rage, biting and clawing any part of anyone I could get hold of, but I’d been sick and starved too long. A soldier turned casually and clubbed me with the blunt end of a hatchet, again and again until I fell away weakly. It never could have happened had I been well nourished. He and another held me down.

  “Do it to the kid while this bitch watches, Frank,” he shouted to one of his companions who was throwing Matt onto his back. He’d fed well by the time they grabbed him and it took four of them to hold down this one small boy. He beat his arms and legs in frenzy, almost jerking free of them. Pink foam ran freely from his lips. He began to vaporize, fingers and hair turning to smoke.

  “Get him fast. He’s shifting. Don’t want to lose the little bastard,” the soldiers were shouting.

  I heard Matt cry out for me as someone pulled Matt’s own crucifix up over his tee-shirt and pressed it against one baby blue eye. The boy shrieked as skin bubbled and the optic tissue popped as if probed with a hot poker. His misting stopped, hair and fingers reforming.

  “So, momma, do you just suck necks or could we interest you in something streamlined?” one of the soldiers remarked as he hit me in the crotch with the axe’s blunt end several times.

  I doubled up, coughing up what few bloody mouthfuls I’d swallowed only minutes before.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, babbled that inane tape. The soldiers hocked out the words roughly as they pinned Matt’s soul to the earth.

  “Sucker’s full,” joked the man with the pure iron as blood fountained up into his face. “Not hard to find the heart on this one. That other one was so dry he didn’t even spurt.”

  They laughed as I struggled, weaker, no more violently than a toss in troubled sleep would produce. I wept as I watched them behead my little boy.

  “Are you getting all this down, sucker?” one of the soldiers pinning me asked.

  Once, in the shimmering night of richer moments, even these men would have admired my beauty and sought out the sweetness offered in my shadow. Their sweaty faces leered now, and sour perspiration dripped from them into my eyes. Matt’s voice thinned away like the spectral smoke he once did well, into the solar wind a scream that was a dying flute playing Greensleeves.

  You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you… The tape whined on, sappy, bemused on saccharine.

  “Please don’t take my sunshine a-way!” the soldiers sang lustily, whooping it up as if at a drunken wake.

  “Your turn, baby. How do you like your stake? Slow and easy or hard and fast?”

  A soldier produced another hearty splinter of iron, ready-made by a foundry for the commission and the material of choice since hawthorn wasn’t plentiful. I was too weak to fight at all. I looked up at the ring of oily, mortal faces prepared to launch me from the night’s musky eternity into another dark’s unconscious impotence. Ten years we possessed the forever. Now it seemed we were past our season, like the fireflies. I could see them, winking in the night sky, as the soldiers ripped off my blouse to expose my pale breasts.

  “X marks the spot.” Old mallet-man chuckled.

  One of them screamed. Not bells nor chimes but the raucous, grating human version that clattered with a rattle in the wind. A firefly had landed in his hair and he went up like a torch.

  It was raining fire, pellets of it striking the lake and fizzing. The soldiers jumped to their feet, forgetting about me, and began to run for cover. Only there was no cover from this storm.

  Corona bolts flashed over the water, and highrises were exploding on the visible silhouette of downtown. All of the Aurora men were on fire before they could even make it to their van—which was useless anyway.

  I stood up wearily in the shower of sparks and flames, seeing the bodies of my husband and son ablaze. Staked and decapitated, their flesh dissolved into spilled ether, whispering steam as it glossed, then slid off in graying layers from unravelling limbs to cloying bits of sizzling organs in an ashening pool.

  The humans fried differently, more brightly. I stumbled to the nearest and grabbed his shriveling body. I took him, and then I helped myself to another. More, feasting quickly before their juices could boil away. It was like sucking the juices from whole carcasses roasting on spits, trying to catch the glimmering red that spouted from the cracks before it could run as grease into the flames. I held their crackling bodies to me and couldn’t burn myself as they blackened into husks, then fell apart in my hands. I fed well. Deeply. Until my veins glowed and my own skin shone all rosy in hell.

  I brought out my wings easily and ascended through the walls of incredible heat. My shifting was arch, leathery, and I knew that I would never be able to shift back. The wings were mine forever. As were the talons and the harsh rustle of skin as stiff and lustrous as taffeta.

  My back angled under the coarsening ridge of deformed spine that supported the wings. On the ground I scuttled crookedly, warped and graceless when not in the air. Only my face was still beautiful, my eyes bright as moonlight and my lips full, able to sing chimes and sweet high bells to lure travelers into my nest of stings. Happy little tunes to catch them off-guard.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…

  But when alone I remembered the true music, while the sun swelled like a sore on the other side of the world until even the dark became too hot to bear. And I would shed Lilith tears over that lost dusk that had glittered so. I love thee as I love the night.

  | — | — |

  RENAUD

  Renaud claimed crusader lineage. He said it was the haunting dreams of Antioch’s coast of smoky waves and solemn Jerusalem’s pale blocks of praying stone that made him return there a pilgrim, a soldier of divinely-inspired rage, a lover of gold-belted dancers calling him to the land of incarnations.

  He brought a curious armoire all the way from his native France. He did this while swearing distaste for such modern impious generals as Napoleon who were neither saints nor Coeur de lions.

  Some said Renaud was a divested aristocrat who had escaped the guillotine during the revolution. Some said he’d been a rebel who had tired of the slaughter of Christian queens. Some said he’d been with the Corsican in Moscow and that the closet box was filled with gold icons and the emeralds of frozen czarinas. They said that many soldiers had perished while dragging it through the bitter icy retreat home.

  Whatever he had been, Renaud kept the armoire sealed with its doors hammered shut. But the scents of cassis and patchouli still leaked exotic intimations at the edges.

  He began the life of pleasurable repose, devastating his senses with aphrodisiacs as he called himself the sheikh of beauty, hunting without shame the gazelle of the sands. He sang a song he’d written after the fa
shion of Solomons and troubadours, and won some little fame for it.

  “Oh, ye gorgeous men of Turkish flesh, soft balls of marzipan whispering strange songs of Istanbul as spangled hips trace the wisdom of the ancient moon. Oh, ye dusky Jewish shepherds of shy smiles and spiced flat stomachs that absorb pain to deliver back a manifold mystery. Oh, ye oriental boys of Christendom who have in many blood-tipped eons borne the loins and lances of every invader and died the thousand deaths of holyland virtue. I will be an Arab and a knight to all. An infidel and an infidel.”

  He would bear Byzantine roses and poetry this time in the desert. He would give them brandy from his Paris hometown. He would give incarnadine peaches from Moorish ruins of Spain.

  “Touch my yellow hair and sigh upon these carpets. Perform the perversions sacrosanct at midnight. Blush like the virgins of seventh heavens as you unfold each veil for your hero. Taste of pepper and musk in the damask air as sandalwood arouses us to match the drums and the Mesopotamian tambourines in rhythm.”

  A great many young men came to him. Their kohl eyes strayed to the cabinet, imagining the wealth of French Dynasty diamonds, the silk corsets and silver stays of Antoinette, boots of musketeers polished into black mirrors, costly perfumes from the ambergris seed that would lure even angels to sniff at damp pulse points.

  They were distracted. It wasn’t that Renaud failed to be a fabulous lover as he shed his rich brocade robes to fall in folds beside the sensible European waistcoat. It wasn’t that he failed to be handsome as he lifted the grand muslin turban to set it aside the felt tri-cornered hat. It wasn’t that, thus dishabille, he lacked the grace and finesse of a masculine weapon. Renaud was older and covered with scars. A master in Baghdad had inked these in until he was a walking mosaic from fabled Hagia Sophia. As such the boys loved to touch him. They traced the rainbow of his agonized history with trembling tangerine fingertips. Yet their cyanine-star eyes compelled to the vision of the armoire and to imaginings of sapphire sword hilts and plumage crowns in peacock and pearls. They murmured at the pretty lines of his prose. They yielded with all the deviance of eastern sorcery. They became his erogenous clergy of religieux, hoping all the while that he would show them the occult opulence.